Information Technology (IT) systems and programs services occasionally experience hardware and software errors while they are in operation. These errors include random hardware system failures, software programming discrepancies, or a combination of both. When a user of the IT service detects an error, the user may contact a help service that is assigned to that specific IT service. The user may contact the help service by telephone or by e-mail, for example. The user must then provide the help service with the specific details of the error detected. The error reported to the help service placed in a general queue before randomly assigning the alert to an analyst for processing. Alternatively, the error alerts can be assigned to a help service coordinator. In the latter case, the coordinator classifies the error using several parameters, such as criticality, and then assigns the error to an analyst for processing.
Randomly assigning an error to an analyst is not efficient, however. For example, certain analysts may have specific skills or experiences that enable them to more efficiently process certain errors as compared to other analysts. Moreover, different analysts have different workload capacities, and therefore, process errors in different manners. Randomly assigning errors to analysts from a queue does not take these factors into consideration. Similarly, utilizing a help service coordinator to assign errors to analysts is not efficient. A help service coordinator is prone to making mistakes in categorizing and properly assigning the errors to the analysts. Furthermore, either scenario may create unnecessary delays in getting errors assigned to analysts.